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Highs and (Rare) Lows in Restaurant Wine Prices

Good restaurants have a lot of costs to cover when they're pricing their wines, but some restaurateurs seem to take it too far. Lettie Teague on how to tell when you're overpaying

What goes into restaurant wine markups? Lettie Teague has a look at why 300% of the wholesale price is pretty reasonable, while 400% (as she found at one New York restaurant) starts to be a bit much. Photo: Getty Images.

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Lettie Teague

June 21, 2013 4:31 p.m. ET

ALTHOUGH I'LL ADMIT I'm particularly (perhaps even preternaturally) sensitive to restaurant wine prices, it seems as if they've gone up a lot lately—even more than they have in retail wine shops. Are restaurant wine directors actually paying more for their wines, or are they just taking higher markups? According to Chuck Ellis, president of the Newton, Mass.-based research group Restaurant Sciences, it's actually a bit of both.

Restaurant wine prices for the same wines are definitely higher overall, said Mr. Ellis in a...